Chebucto vs Copada

The Diva has challenged us to combine two fun tangles this week. Chebucto and Copada - Both are from the talented Margaret Bremner. I tried two different approaches this week.  The first I did in a spiral - three groupings of Chebucto followed by three groupings of Copada, and repeated this pattern till the spiral ran out. Interesting, but not entirely successful to me. So I simplified the next tile and used them as basic borders - I like the symmetry in this one better.

Florida tangle trip

Did I ever mention that you can find tangles anywhere? Yup, I've been in Florida for a destination wedding of  my niece. It was a lovely setting on the beach and it sure beat the -4 degree weather on the day we left home. The coral rock above was just begging me to look at it more closely to see the patterns.

 My granddaughters decided that they needed to take full advantage of the wedding setup on the beach and 'marry' daddy.

The youngest grandchild isn't walking yet - but he is crawling and I was lucky to get a picture of him before he took off again.

The girls are all planning their future modeling careers.

I loved the centerpieces!!!

Yes, they were using a sword to cut their cake.

This was just one of many beautiful sunsets we had. 

We had a great trip on a boat off Marco Island. Dolphins were attracted to the boat and put on quite a show for us!

On vacation

Not too much zentangle posting this week but getting some excitement. These dolphins loved to swim in front of our boat.

200th diva challenge

Congratulations to Laura, aka "the Diva". She has given us 200 zentangle challenges to date.

For the 200th challenge she asked us to use our comfort tangle and to incorporate the number 200 into the tile.

Bales has always been my comfort tangle so I played with it here. I decided to really go with the 200 theme and managed to do this with 200 strokes of the pen. Every time I picked the pen up or changed direction, I counted it as a new stroke.
I did this in a moving car using a CD box to draw on. Some of the lines are a little wobbly but there are no mistakes in Zentangle right? Right!

I ended up feeling that this was my Bales garden.  There is still room to this garden to grow - Likewise, I  hope the Diva will continue to challenge us - and help us continue to grow.

My OSU son - Congratulations Buckeyes!

Did you see the halftime show tonight? Jimmy Kimmel had 3 signs he picked out of the crowd to compete for the Golden Sharpie trophy.

My son Kurt was there with his sign. His sign said "Look I have markers!"

Good thing Santa brought him markers for Christmas. 

I managed to get a brief video of the clip - if you are curious, click here - YouTube

String 74

String 74 from TanglePatterns.com is the string on this week's challenge from Adele Bruno at Tickled to Tangle. She asked us to use it with the tangles Kiss, Lealand and Twisted. I like the string but I wasn't sure how to incorporate the tangles into it. So I just went for it and this is what came out. 

I started with one of my hand colored tiles and did the tangles with a pink pen. Shading was done with two colored pencils, a mulberry color and a purple color. Additional highlights came from a white charcoal pencil.

Laurie in Northbrook

One of the best parts of teaching Zentangle is when I am invited to teach in someone's home. Last night I was invited to Laurie's home in Northbrook to introduce Zentangle to 12 ladies. They were an enthusiastic bunch. I heard several of them express self doubt as they were working on their tiles. BUT - as we put their tiles together into our mosiac, it seemed like a light bulb went on. All the tiles were so beautiful even though they all had a slightly different way of interpreting the tangle patterns. Thanks!

N E W

Cheryl Rotnem has started her challenge again. I enjoy her challenges as she simply gives us letters that our tangles should start with and we are then free to explore our library of tangles to find ones that catch our fancy. The tangles I chose are;

N - Nymph , Melinda Barlow
E - Euca , Anne Marks
W - Wolf Trail,  Sue Jacobs

Happy New Year!

Hitched and Tami

The challenge this week is to try a new tangle pattern - it's called 'Hitched' from Heidi Sue. I had a lot of fun playing with variations. We've finally started getting some snow (along with incredible cold) so I was thinking snowflakes when I did this. Hitched can be done in a curve but it's easiest to do it in a line or border. So it worked well to form my snowflake. I started with a white gelly roll pen and added blue colored pencil for shading. The picture below shows an early stage. I had the basic pattern in but I knew I needed to keep going. I added a few more tangleation details to Hitched. 

Then I decided to add something to the outer areas. SuzyMosh  has started a challenge called "That's new to me". You can find her blog here. She is encouraging us to find tangle patterns we haven't used before, and add them to our work. This week they are to start with the letter 'T'. I found a tangle pattern called 'Tami". I used a tangleation of it around my zendala.

I took this picture late at night with the desk lamp. So the quality of the picture isn't too good. Sorry!

String 68 - Schway and Paradox

String 68 is the challenge this week from Adele Bruno at Tickled to Tangle. She asked us to use the tangles Paradox and Schway. I really like both these tangle patterns and the string was intriguing as it looks like an arrow by itself. I didn't try to go to far out of the box this week but I knew what I wanted to do and I was feeling industrious so I got two tiles done.